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Gunkerty Jeb writes, quoting Threatpost: "A former Cal State San Marcos student was sentenced to a year in prison this week for election tampering by using keystroke loggers to grab student credentials and then vote for himself. Matthew Weaver, 22, of Huntington Beach, Calif., stole almost 750 students' identities to try and become president of the San Diego County college's student government. His plan went awry when the school's computer technicians noticed an anomaly in activity and caught Weaver with keystroke loggers as he sat in front of the suspicious computer."

I only have crappy teen dramas to go by but isn't being college president some kind of big career boosting deal as well? Something you can put on your CV. It sounds like there may have been financial gain too.

Well, as others have pointed out, it was the identity theft that did him in.

However, keep in mind that depending on the school, significant amounts of money flow through the office. When I was in college we had a scandal where the president and vp embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from student government.

This is a freaking school election...not a federal / city/state election..it is college, it means NOTHING....

I can see them being punished by the school, but WTF...Federal Prison?!?!?

Well you would have a point if all he did was rig a school election by distributing flyers telling people the election date has been changed or something of that nature.

However you seem to have missed the part of TFS that says he put keyloggers on other people's computers and stole their id/password. That's illegal and a jail-able offense. Or do you believe somebody putting a keylogger trojan on your computer should be legal?

Or do you believe somebody putting a keylogger trojan on your computer should be legal?

Just because someone thinks the punishment is excessive, doesn't mean they think that the crime should be legal.

Likewise, just because someone thinks the punishment was excessive in one scenario, doesn't mean they'd think it excessive in other scenarios. You wouldn't punish someone for stealing a snickers bar as harshly as you would if they'd stolen an iPad, would you?

Okay, it seems I really did misread the intent behind your words, and I apologize for that and for unfairly maligning your position.

Every single dollar or man hour of effort spent trying to catch a hacker, is infinitely better spent improving security to make hacking more difficult....Legislators, law enforcement, lawyers and courts are expensive. Rather than putting a few hackers in jail, we could use that money to research security holes and fix them for billions of people.

I'm not entirely sure I agree with that, but I can't quite get up on my high horse about that one.:-)

I don't think the legal costs of sending hackers to jail is more expensive than the costs of subsidizing security, nor do I think the government should be in the business of subsidizing the costs of fixing sloppy programming. Writing solid, secure code is hard and expensive.

Wow...just wow.I can understand him getting kicked out of school, but freaking federal prison for a year for just messing with a STUDENT school election?!?![...]This is a freaking school election...not a federal / city/state election..it is college, it means NOTHING....

Read the full article (especially the utsandiego.com link). He committed wire fraud -- the winner of the presidential election gets a $8000 stipend, and the vice-president gets $7000. He planned ahead (even putting together a PowerPoint presentation the year before for his frat brothers to run for the #2 slot) to "win" these prizes. Fraud over wire for financial gain is a serious federal crime with a maximum of 20 years in prison.

He also attempted to cover up his crime once caught *red-handed* at the machine he was entering the votes from in a computer lab by later creating Facebook profiles in other real people's names and generating a lot of fake comments intended to make it look like those people had conspired to frame him, and he sent it to local media outlets. It was stupid in way that shows how much smarter he thinks he is than the people around him.

This kid is a budding con artist. He was acting for financial motive to defraud the school, and he was willing to trash the lives of others to try to get out of paying the penalty for something he did. This kid has displayed blatant, selfish disregard for others and a willingness to hurt or exploit them for profit.

This isn't a harmless prank. These are the actions of a malicious liar with an inflated sense of his own capabilities who doesn't seem to grasp the idea that consequences should apply to him for his actions. They should have thrown the book at him. Imagine the harm he could have done if he'd waited a few more years to "ripen" as a criminal and landed himself in management somewhere.

Exactly. This is hardly a case of a kid doing something stupid without thinking it through. This guy had plenty of time to examine his actions, he had plenty of opportunity to back out, and he was repeatedly shown that his actions had consequences. And yet, at every step of the way, he chose to proceed. Even after he was caught he chose to perpetrate a cover-up! These are not the actions of a silly kid, they are the actions of a criminal. This kid deserves the punishment he received.

I can understand him getting kicked out of school, but freaking federal prison for a year for just messing with a STUDENT school election?!?!

Typically student presidents are paid a salary from the student union (it's usually a role for people once they've graduated). This isn't just some 'student election', it's an attempt to defraud the university students of $20,000+. Jail is the right punishment for this crime.

I can understand him getting kicked out of school, but freaking federal prison for a year for just messing with a STUDENT school election?!?!

Geez, we're getting out of hand here...I've been hearing of small school children getting kicked out of school and having the cops called just for playing in the school play ground using their hands and fingers as 'guns' yelling bang bang at each other.

This is a freaking school election...not a federal / city/state election..it is college, it means NOTHING....

I can see them being punished by the school, but WTF...Federal Prison?!?!?

You are one gynormous ignoramus of the law. He stole people's credentials and broke into a system. These two are federal felonies. Do you live in some alternate universe version of the US where federal law doesn't include computer fraud and identity theft? Or are you simply being obtuse, seeking an opportunity to cry about the abuse of powah!!!!?

He didn't go to jail because somebody gives a damn about the class president, he went to jail because he compromized hundreds of access credentials and used them to gain unauthorized access to systems(and, unless the school's IT office is fairly conservative, the odds are increasingly good that you can hardly touch their system without crossing state lines).

His pitiful attempts at hiding probably didn't endear him to anybody, either.

And we need to consider more than the financial motive. Imagine the damage that could have been done to the reputations of the students whose identities he stole if even a single media outlet had picked up on his "news tips".

Serious...? Uh, this is a student election. He got this sentence because he used "hacker" tactics..

RTFA. He got sentenced for identity theft and computer fraud. Either you think this guy did not commit identity theft and computer fraud, or you think these two acts should not be punishable by federal law, or you simply do not know WTF is going on.

Actually, they probably want ones with a strong sense of ethics that can be bent in a direction of their choosing. You don't get nearly as hard work out of someone ethically unmoored as you do out of someone who is acting for a "greater good," and you get even more work out of someone who doesn't even see the lesser evil. Worse for the former, you may get junk data since they don't care enough.

No, no greater evil is committed than by those who believe they are doing a great good. There are plenty of people in this country that passionately believe the principle that only those who do wrong have something to hide and that privacy is nothing but a shield for criminals. That's a form of strong ethics, though it's one I'd disagree with.

yeah he should of set up a virtual server and had the key logger report to it then ssh'ed into it from a out of country proxy to get the credentials then cheat. oh look three black suv's pulled up and i hear a helicopter got to go.

A year in prison for the crime of fixing a vote while not being a professional political operative. At least the kid knows he's got a shot at a good job when he gets out. Better prospects than if he had finished his program at Cal State San Marcos.

I'd love to see all the carefully organized evidence you have of professional political operatives engaging in vote fixing. Oh right, this is just a cynicism race-to-the-bottom, driven by paranoid conspiracy theories.

How about the mayor in Florida that lost voting machines that were later shown to contain many more votes for the Ds than those for R. The mayor is a stanch R supporter, and when questioned how the fuck did these voting machines get lost, she replied "it happens, voting is a complex business". Yup, so complex, they were deliberately disconnected, moved to another room, and covered in a pile of boxes to disguise they were there.

On election night, the preliminary returns showed a very slight lead for Coleman, and the collated returns somewhat later showed an even slighter lead. As it happens, differences of a thousand votes or so are common from election-night return, and Coleman's lead was a lot smaller than that.

Minnesota law mandates a recount when the margin of victory is that small, and that is done by going to the actual paper ballots. The tabulation machines are good but not perfect. Once that count was done, Franken had a slight lead. This was perfectly normal variation. The fact is that the election was so close that the state hadn't actually established a preference in any statistically valid manner, so from a statistical point of view they were equal.

That being done, the Coleman campaign kept pushing for more iffy ballots to be counted, since they were behind. The Franken campaign never had reason to do so. Each batch of increasingly iffier ballots pushed Franken's lead a teeny bit higher. It would appear that, in that election, Democrats were more likely to come up with slightly unclear ballots than Republicans. The system for absentee ballots turned out to have a few issues (the instructions that went with them were incomplete), and this was remedied for the next election. (FWIW, I don't think Mom's ballot was counted.)

The details were overseen by a panel of three judges, who examined the questionable ballots. It isn't necessarily easy to discern voter intent unambiguously, and it's arguable whether an individual ballot is unambiguous or not (illogical though that seems). Finally, the counting was over, and the state Supreme Court spent about a month reviewing the process. At the end, they concluded it was as fair as it was going to get, and Franken won.

Of the eight judges and justices involved, four were nominated by Republicans, two by Democrats, and two by Jesse Ventura when he served a term as Governor as an independent. The final certification was signed by the Republican governor. If there was partisan influence, it wasn't from the Democrats.

There were some questions left about ballots. One precinct had apparently lost the ballots from one machine, and in one precinct there were doubts about whether spoiled ballots were properly disposed of (tearing them in half works). Franken's final lead was significantly larger than any questions about them.

Overall, it looked like a very careful nonpartisan recount. If somebody has actual evidence against that, I'd like to see it.

Oh right, this is just a cynicism race-to-the-bottom, driven by paranoid conspiracy theories.

Sadly, I have found that both of those tend to be surprisingly accurate in the long run.

Assuming the worst of politicians (and, really, everyone else) proves right more than by simple chance. Assuming you can trust them just leads to more problems than assuming you can't and keeping a close eye on them.

The problem is that often, cynicism is not about having a close eye on them, but taking that sheep stance of "yeah, everybody does it, meh". And the, just because nobody cares, indeed, everybody starts doing it.

If someone steals my credentials, I'd expect that kind of punishment. I don't think he's being made an example, he's actually getting off light.There's a lot of other things that he could potentially do, or has exposed those students to by capturing their passwords. It's not that he was caught trying to rig an election, it's that he was impersonating other individuals, stealing their identities.

The jail time in an of itself is nothing. What we are doing is f'd up. It ensure more criminal activity will occur because this person will never be able to succeed in any other way now (other than as a criminal).

But he may have had political ambitions too. Nothing like a formal charge of election fraud to end a political career. Agreed that what a conviction does to a persons future is far too excessive - in fact, it should theoretically have zero effect since the jail term is allegedly the punishment.

I did something similar at "Canada's Premiere Undergraduate Experience"

Long story short, one of the people running for Student Union President won my House election the year before. He did so by getting the competition kicked out on technicalities. No, I wasn't running, and No, I wasn't friends with anyone who did. Since every day a poster is up is a "violation" they racked up fast. This guy was going out with the person who's job it is to notify people of potential violations, and they were never warned.

Fast forward two years, and I logged in as every. single. student. from a MacDonalds down the road. Didn't actually vote, just logged in, logged right back out. Then repeated 8k times. Once a student logged in, they had an hour to finish. Since everyone's hour was up at 9AM, almost no one voted.

Somehow, there was still a landslide win. Not only did he have 90% of the votes, he had more votes than there were students in the entire university.

The whole election should have been thrown out. People complained on official forums, topics were deleted as fast as they went up.

I did something similar at "Canada's Premiere Undergraduate Experience"

Long story short, one of the people running for Student Union President won my House election the year before. He did so by getting the competition kicked out on technicalities. No, I wasn't running, and No, I wasn't friends with anyone who did. Since every day a poster is up is a "violation" they racked up fast. This guy was going out with the person who's job it is to notify people of potential violations, and they were never warned.

Fast forward two years, and I logged in as every. single. student. from a MacDonalds down the road. Didn't actually vote, just logged in, logged right back out. Then repeated 8k times. Once a student logged in, they had an hour to finish. Since everyone's hour was up at 9AM, almost no one voted.

Somehow, there was still a landslide win. Not only did he have 90% of the votes, he had more votes than there were students in the entire university.

The whole election should have been thrown out. People complained on official forums, topics were deleted as fast as they went up.

It pays to play dirty apparently.

Have to be careful when playing dirty. In my elementary school was a fellow running for class president and he was well liked and popular. One of his competitors for the honor (as there really wasn't much to the office) found he had been born outside the US (he was an Aussie by birth) and this revelation -- why it was even considered by the faculty baffled me -- meant the popular student was ineligible. It really broke his heart and seemed incredibly unfair, particularly to classmates. Keep in mind most of us were 12 or younger, but we already had a pretty well developed sense of what is fair and how you deal with weasels who succeed in removing competition by devious means, the weasel was soundly defeated in the vote. So the lesson here isn't that you cannot have your competitor diminished by technicalities or smearing, but you should always have a surrogate do it on the side so you don't get caught for the 'Swiftboating'.

On the one hand, fraud is bad. On the other, student government is usually a joke that deserves to be pranked. At the college level it is, AFAIK, not much better than HS. Our Class President gave a friggin' 15 minute speech at commencement. Holy Crap! That was the only real debacle at graduation. I'll never forget it. That's all I remember about the class president.

On the one hand, fraud is bad. On the other, student government is usually a joke that deserves to be pranked. At the college level it is, AFAIK, not much better than HS. Our Class President gave a friggin' 15 minute speech at commencement. Holy Crap! That was the only real debacle at graduation. I'll never forget it. That's all I remember about the class president.

Student government is seldom more than a popularity contest.

It can be good training (relatively speaking and tongue firmly in cheek) for figuring out social engineering skills - what are the hot buttons for people, what people are likely to remember of your (ha) promises after you've been elected and practice in keeping skeletons from accumulating in your closet.

Stealing an election at my college (back in the day) would've been a lot easier than this. I should know: I was in charge of running them one year, and I could've simply picked who I wanted to win (but I didn't).

I just read some of these. I don't know about the rest, but the Roger Hedgecock article states that the bailiff gave the jury alcohol and pushed for a conviction. After much wrangling and seeming judicial misconduct (judge stating he thought Hedgecock was guilty, and therefore would not release interview transcripts to the defense) the State Supreme Court ruled in Hedgecock's favor. He then plead to a misdemeanor, with *no* retrial.

No he doesn't. He lied to Sheldon to win the Magic competition then manipulated Penny into leaving Leonard then used his stardom(?) to jump the line in front of everyone else who was waiting for the re-release of the movie.

Sorry, that's just soulless on many levels and borders on sociopathic.

Yet another American deprived of his right to a trial. No doubt they would have tried to send him to prison for a decade or more if he decided to exercise his rights.

A year in prison is probably a fair outcome if the story is as described. But he deserves to have a jury decide that, and not face absurd amounts of time in prison if he wants a jury trial.

He chose not to fight the charges. He was not deprived of his right to a trial. He could of plead not guilty.
How about maybe he felt bad about what he did and actually plead guilty because he is in fact guilty.
Maybe he decided to actually take personal responsibility for his actions and acknowledge in a court of law that what he did was wrong.
Since your not his lawyer all you can do is speculate on his reasons for pleading guilty.

Or, you're actually guilty and you know the prosecution has enough evidence to prove it. Nah, that never happens, people only lose in court because the defense messed up or the jury doesn't like your suit.

Yes, a year in prison is fair given the nature of his crime given that he pleaded guilty.

Yet I wouldn't agree with that being a fair sentence if he decided to "exercise his rights". Exercising your rights is appropriate when your rights are being trampled, such as when you're being prosecuted for a crime that you didn't commit, you are being charged under the wrong law, or when you're planning to challenge the constitutionality of a law. Exercising your rights because you hope to get off for a crime that

Exercising your rights is appropriate when your rights are being trampled

Such as being denied a jury trial.

such as when you're being prosecuted for a crime that you didn't commit

You don't know, in a legal sense, whether someone is being prosecuted for a crime they didn't commit until they have been found guilty by a jury of their peers. If you can deny someone of a jury trial because you "know" they are guilty, what's the point of a jury trial at all?

I'm guessing that you have never served on a jury in the USA. I have twice and it just left me completely cynical about the entire US justice system and the use of juries in general. Literally anything can happen on a jury. A lot of ugly horse trading goes on like "OK, that guy over there wants a conviction on all counts, that woman over there wants him found innocent on all counts but she admits he may be guilty on one count... can we just agree on a guilty verdict on that one count and call it a day?"

Yet another American deprived of his right to a trial. No doubt they would have tried to send him to prison for a decade or more if he decided to exercise his rights.

A year in prison is probably a fair outcome if the story is as described. But he deserves to have a jury decide that, and not face absurd amounts of time in prison if he wants a jury trial.

There was an $8000 stipend for the winner. This wasn't just a simple resume builder. He committed fraud to attempt to win a monetary prize due to the fair winner. Something he'd planned out the year before with four of his fraternity brothers running for the vice-president slot and it's $7000 stipend. This was planned for monetary benefit. Hell, his attorney's statement that wasn't even planning on staying at the school is even more damning in that light.

You might be right. In either case, it's wrong to deprive him of his right to a trial. If he actually deserves a decade in prison, charge him with that and let a jury decide. If he actually deserves a year in prison, charge him with that and let a jury decide. That's how an actual justice system works. Twisting his arm until you get a confession is just barbarism.

That's extortion. If someone were bullied by the government out of their right to criticize the government, would you say "Not criticizing the government avoids certain un-pleasantries"?

The whole point of having rights is that the government cannot make your life more unpleasant for exercising them. Getting extra charges tacked on for exercising your right to a trial is no more just than getting extra attention from the IRS for exercising your right to criticize the government.

By that token, everything the government does is "Extortion". Taxes included.

Yes, everything the government does is extortion. The whole purpose of government is to apply force to encourage certain behaviors. The difference is that we have a constitution that limits what the government is allowed to extort us into. The right to a trial by jury is one of those limits.

Why yes, yes I am an anarchist. Unless you think that all people who rule will rule well (and by extension, there will never be a bad ruler), then you too should be an anarchist.

Let's start with monarchy. Monarchy is a great system, if the monarch is fair, just, not prone to being petty, etc. But actually, you still have to deal with the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy needs to be good, and the individuals within it need to either be good, or be prevented from being bad by rules that are enforced.

"Getting extra charges tacked on for exercising your right to a trial is no more just than getting extra attention from the IRS for exercising your right to criticize the government."

Except for one little detail. One was optional, the other was not. IRS Scandal was not at the option of those being scandalized by the IRS, while this one was. He had a chance to go to trial, he chose against it.

You know, if he had been some independent student who fucked with the results as a means of protest, I might agree with that.

But no - he was a candidate, and he rigged the election in his own favor. Thus, dude was not an activist making a point, he was an ego-maniacal douche-bag that wanted to secure power for himself and cheat his fellow students out of a free and fair election.